Android Keyboard-Maker SwiftKey Confirms Accel As Another Investor In Its $17.5M Series B

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Alternative Android keyboard maker, SwiftKey, whose software is set to be running on some 100 million devices by the year’s end, has added another investor to its $17.5 million Series B round — revealing, in a blog post today, that Accel Partners was also part of the round announced back in September.

At the time, SwiftKey said Index Ventures led the round, along with existing investors including Octopus Investment and a number of angel investors, plus some new angels — including Nick Hynes and Carl Uminski (Somo), Jon Craton (previously Cramer Systems), and the Cambridge Capital Group.

Today we’re happy to announce that Accel Partners has also invested in SwiftKey as part of this finance round – something we weren’t in a position to publicly confirm until now.

We’ll be working closely with Accel general partner Rich Wong, who has led on this investment. He brings a wealth of experience in building transformative mobile businesses so it’s great to have Rich involved as we accelerate our plans at SwiftKey. Accel Partners has been an investor in leading mobile companies such as Supercell, Rovio (Angry Birds), MoPub, Trulia, Admob and many others.

The wording of the blog (“until now”) suggests Accel was part of the round all along but SwiftKey declined to comment beyond what it’s said in the blog post.

Accel and SwiftKey are also not disclosing the amount of the funding but sources close to the matter say Index is still the lead investor, and that this it is an expansion of the original Series B — being a second close. The amount invested by Accel is also smaller than the firm’s usual investments, according to our sources.

Back in September, SwiftKey said it would be using the Series B funding to expand its product portfolio and do a major US push. On the former front it recently outted SwiftKey 4.3, a unified smartphone and tablet-friendly version of its keyboard software that lets users resize and reposition the keyboard so it can work with a variety of device types and form factors.

Today, SwiftKey’s blog concludes:

Everyone at SwiftKey is focused on continuing to innovate. We believe that the next generation of mobile technology won’t just be smart – it will provide a more human experience; one that adapts to you, not the other way around.

We could not have a better team of investors alongside us as we work towards this vision.

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OverviewSwiftKey is a technology company that aims to enhance interaction between keyboards and people. It upgrades smartphone keyboards to make typing faster, by utilizing artificial intelligence to learn from each user in order to autocorrect and predict their next word. The SwiftKey Keyboard for Android supports more than 80 languages.
SwiftKey was founded by Ben Medlock and Jon Reynolds in 2008 and is …